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January 22, 2009
11:05
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January 20, 2009
4:43
Twingly launches microblog search — Twitter search with a sprinkle of Jaiku and a dash of Identi.ca
» VentureBeat

Blog search tool Twingly’s new microblog search, as a concept, makes a lot of sense. You enter a keyword in one search box and get results for services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca. But in practice there’s a problem — and it’s not Twingly’s problem — it’s every service besides Twitter’s problem: Twitter overwhelms the results.

You see, Twitter is much more popular than any of the other services being indexed so if I do a Twingly search for say, “Obama,” I have to go eleven pages deep before I get one result that isn’t from Twitter. So that begs the questions: Why not just use Twitter search?

Of course, results will vary based on how popular the search term is that you are entering. For less popular terms, Twingly could certainly be useful. And to some degree it is for things like vanity searches, where I want to find if anyone says my name on any of these services.

And of course you can filter out Twitter results by un-checking the box on the right hand side of the page. Also especially nice is that I can easily get an RSS link for any search I make, so I can subscribe to it in my feed reader rather than having to do it over and over again.

The Twitter “problem” will also be helped a bit when FriendFeed results are added to the mix, which Twingly’s Anton Johansson tells us is coming soon. But that raises another question: Why not just use FriendFeed to search for these results? After all, FriendFeed search scans Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca and the now defunct Pownce as well (though not the Swedish Bloggy and the German Bleeper — which Twingly included since the company is based in Europe).

But Twingly is saying the right things on its blog. In proclaiming to the the first federated microblog search, Twingly is calling on any other microblogging services to add their results to the site. But again, in microblogging there is Twitter, and then there is everyone else.

So while Twingly’s microblog search is potentially useful for some queries, until these other services start to prove themselves, Twitter search (or FriendFeed) will probably be enough for most people.
2:15
Yammer ups bet on the “Twitter for business” market
» VentureBeat

This could be the year that micro-messaging makes it big with businesses, Yammer is betting. The company lets employee share 140-character messages about what they’re working on — a simple intranet to help communicate more quickly than through masses of emails and phone calls. It has raised $5 million from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, founder David Sacks tells TechCrunch.

I’d be interested to hear specific ways that Yammer saves companies time and money — the usual requirement of business software. Lower phone bills? Less time reading email? It’s not clear what sort of traction Yammer has gotten since it launched and took home the grand prize at the TechCrunch50 startup conference in August. Anecdotally, we’ve heard good reports.

Certainly, the growth of consumer-facing Twitter this past year — estimated in the millions — suggests that the concept of micro-messaging is going mainstream. But for business? West Hollywood, Calif-based Yammer, through the TC50 win, seems to have branded itself as the go-to “Twitter for business” app. To sign up, somebody in a company creates an account using their work address (johnsmith@acme.com), then invites colleagues at the company who use the the same workplace email domain (billybob@acme.com, susiesue@acme.com). Yammer’s idea is to have employees invite each other and so grow virally within a company, similar to what Facebook did on college campuses by having people log in using their student@college.edu email accounts. It also offers an Blackberry app, a way to organize users by workgroup and other features designed specifically for business users. Eventually, Yammer hopes companies will be so addicted to the service that they’ll pay a $1 per month per user fee for premium services, like special administrative features, security and data ownership. If that starts happening, it could have a business model making money before Twitter itself does.

There are many variations of Twitter also coming out. Certainly, what Yammer has built could be duplicated by Twitter itself — there are already other startups building micro-messaging services for businesses. One is Identi.ca, a small startup that recently raised an angel round. It hopes to let users create their own Twitter-like systems, and offers open source software to let them do so. That’s the thing, though. A simple micro-messaging service isn’t hard to create, but it’s hard to operate at scale, and to get the branding and all the little features right — it’s hard to differentiate oneself from the pack. Yammer appears to be doing so.
1:56
Sony Online Entertainment buys Pox Nora
» VentureBeat
1:44
Audium Semiconductor raises $8.5 million for low-power chips
» VentureBeat
0:15
iTunes gets the new U2 single “Get On Your Boots” first
» VentureBeat

When Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm that U2 lead singer Bono is a founder of, recently put $100 million into phone maker Palm (it now owns 39 percent of the company), speculation was that there was a falling out between Bono and Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. Apple, which once made a special U2-branded iPod, of course makes the Palm Pre rival, the iPhone. But U2 launched its new single today “Get On Your Boots” from its upcoming album No Line On the Horizon, and it’s only available for purchase one place: Apple’s iTunes music store.

Headlines this morning heralded the fact that the song was being played on radio stations in Dublin, Ireland (U2’s hometown), but you could actually buy it through iTunes at the same time. You can also listen to it streaming for free on U2’s website, but if you want to buy it, for now, you’ll have to go to iTunes [iTunes Link].

Even better, the song is available in the iTunes Plus format, Apple’s DRM-free format. At Macworld a couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that all tracks in the iTunes store would be DRM-free by the end of the first quarter, a big blow to rival Amazon MP3, which previously had the largest collection of DRM-free music online. And even though U2 is promoting the sale of its new album (which goes on sale February 27 in Ireland, March 2 in other countries and March 3 in the United States) through Amazon, that’s for buying the physical CD — the digital album and track are not yet available in the store. The entire album is available for pre-order (both the standard and a deluxe edition) in the iTunes store, though.

So much for that falling out.
0:00
Billing startup Zuora’s Z-Commerce targets cloud computing
» VentureBeat

Zuora, one of the startups that provides on-demand software to manage companies’ billing and payments, aims to take advantage of growing interest in cloud computing with a new product dubbed Z-Commerce, which will provide Zuora’s services to developers on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

The Redwood City, Calif. startup has already released three products: Z-Billing, which automates the billing process; Z-Payments, which integrates with PayPal to handle the actual payments; and Z-Force (perhaps the only Zuora application whose name isn’t completely self-explanatory), a billing and payment system that integrates with Salesforce.com. What Z-Commerce adds to the mix is as much about audience as it is about functionality — where the other applications targeted a company’s finance department, Z-Commerce is meant for developers to use directly.

The new product includes application programming interfaces (APIs) that let cloud developers access Z-Billing, Z-Payments, and Z-Force; the ability to add one-click order processing to any web site; a full web store; sample code; and more.

Like many other tech commentators, chief executive Tien Tzuo says this is the year cloud computing will really take off. The platforms are here, or will be soon — Amazon, Google, Salesforce’s Force.com, Microsoft’s Windows Azure — but what’s missing is a way for most of the developers to make money. That’s where Zuora’s “business cloud” comes in: Developers can focus on their product while Zuora handles the business infrastructure.

This is a direction that makes sense: As venture capitalist M.R. Rangaswami noted last year, one of the big opportunities for startups lies around services surrounding the big cloud platforms. Interest in billing systems delivered via the software-as-a-service business model seems to be picking up, too. Aria Systems just raised $8 million, and Vindicia is another competitor.

Zuora has raised a total of $21.5 million from backers including Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.
January 19, 2009
22:48
Just in time for the Obama inauguration, Ustream’s iPhone app launches
» VentureBeat

True to its word, live streaming video site Ustream, has released its iPhone application into Apple’s App Store in time for people to watch President Obama’s inauguration on their iPhones live tomorrow.

The app, which I’m using right now, works great. I’m watching the famous Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, and the picture quality is very good. Unfortunately, the streaming video will only work over Wi-Fi and not a 3G connection, a limitation also found in other video streaming apps such as Joost. Even over Wi-Fi, I am experiencing some buffering, but it’s nothing too bad.

You can easily share videos with one click (to email them to friends). You can also search live streams and view upcoming ones. For videos with chatroom functionality, you can also chat from within the app — but you will have to login with a Ustream account to do so.

One thing this app definitely doesn’t let you do is stream video live from your iPhone. There had been some speculation that this would be the first application available in the App Store to let you do that (a version of Qik that has not been released in the App Store has that functionality). Maybe that’s still coming — perhaps that’s why the app is called the Ustream Viewing Application, but as far as I know, Apple is still not permitting apps that record video into the App Store.

The Ustream Viewing Application is a free download. Find it here.
22:17
The Internet’s jammed with broken links of a last chance Google Drive
» VentureBeat

Google Drive, GDrive, “My Stuff,” Platypus — these are all names for Google’s online storage service that has been rumored to be in the works since at least 2005. Blogs are always predicting its impending launch, and even the Wall Street Journal matter-of-factly stated well over a year ago that Google was preparing to unveil the service. But the service is still nowhere to be found.

Well, actually, you can probably find it if you work at Google, where it is said to be used internally (or if you visit this page made for April Fools Day). But the real deal is still nowhere to be found on the Internet all these years later. That isn’t stopping the talk and speculation about it.

New evidence for what may be the mythical Google Drive appears in the recently launched version of Picasa for the Mac. The photo software made by Google apparently has an option to move photo collections to something known as the “Google Web Drive,” as a MacRumors forums member first found. The Google-focused blog Google Blogoscoped did some more digging and found a webpage that previously sent users to a “www10″ service (again, apparently the internal Google Drive) now returns a 404 page error, but its DNS entry has recently been updated with the CNAME entry “webdrive-client.1.google.com.” That’s a lot of web jargon, but basically it means that Google is at least playing around with some sort of “webdrive.”

Google also apparently owns the domains googlewebdrive.com and gdrive.com. The latter was found way back in 2005 when it was also revealed that Google owned the domain name gbrowser.com. That may have seemed odd right up until Google released its own web browser, Chrome, a few months ago.

And finally, Gmail’s product manager Todd Jackson had something interesting to say to CNET’s Josh Lowensohn last week:

“We know people’s file sizes are getting bigger. They want to share their files, keep them in the cloud, and not worry about which computer they’re on. Google wants to be solving these problems.”

While the interview was about Gmail, that’s not stopping some from using it as evidence of the bigger picture: that Google will eventually want to launch a Google Drive. It makes sense — after all, arguably Google’s biggest rival, Microsoft, has a cloud file storage service with Windows Live SkyDrive (yes, a hilarious name). So if Google really wants to solve the online storage problems, it should probably have such a service too.

AOL recently closed its Xdrive online file service to cut costs, and perhaps that’s why Google has delayed launching Google drive. But if I were a betting man, I’d still bet on Google Drive coming at some point in the near future. There are too many hints and broken links out there that point to it.

[Yes, my title is a play on lyrics from Springsteen's "Born to Run" -- too good of a title to pass up.]
21:42
Roundup: Obama’s White House reboot, SoCal’s VC slump and more
» VentureBeat

Here’s the latest pre-inaugural action:

Will Obama “reboot” the White House? — Wired looks at the president-elect’s efforts to become more transparent and responsive through tech, and at the obstacles facing those efforts. The conclusion is worth quoting: “Instead of turning WhiteHouse.gov into a governmental synthesis of Facebook and Wikipedia, or running a permanent campaign off the White House email list, Obama’s best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action.” Yes.

Southern California VC market tanks more than rest of nation – SoCal investments fell 45 percent from the previous quarter, compared to 30 percent nationwide. This reinforces my pro-Northern California bias.

Wozniak: Leave Steve alone! – The Apple cofounder says the media should stop prying into Steve Jobs’ private life, and points out that Apple’s product roadmap usually stretches out a year or two ahead — exactly as we laid out a few days ago. So everyone should just calm down.

Chip factory usage expected to plummet — That means a lot of billion-dollar chip factories are going to be idle or under-used in the coming months, thanks to the downturn.

American people tell Obama what they want — The most popular idea submitted for Obama’s “Citizen Briefing Book” involves ending the “marijuana prohibition.” Thank you, Internet, for reminding us about what’s really important.

How many solar startups are there? — Greentech Media ran a list of 150 solar startups back in November, but it just updated the list and passed the 200 mark.

Intel cuts prices by as much as 48 percent on PC chips — The price cuts come as a result of efficiencies in production, but they should also help clear out inventory that piled up in the holiday season.

Obama inauguration will test the reliability of cell phone networks — Large cell phone carriers are asking people to limit their calls and delay sending photos. Because, as many of us have already learned, providing cell phone service is really hard.

Couple meets, falls in love, and gets married via video game Halo – “Teammates for life!”

Cisco plans to release server computer – This move will put the networking giant in competition with its traditional partners like Hewlett Packard and IBM.

Search advertising gets hit by downturn — One of the most significant indicators of how bad things have gotten will be Google’s earnings report on Thursday, but in the meantime, a recent study is not encouraging.

Spiceworks unveils new version of IT management system — The system is now ready for bigger companies, having increased the official user cap from 250 to 500 users. The ad-supported IT model appears to be paying off: The company tells me it’s rapidly selling out its ad inventory for the coming year.

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